CHAPTER SEVEN
"Souvenir"
Betty baked lasagna, Lars went down for the count. They watched Ghost on cable with Patrick Swayze and Demi Moore, and made passionate love on the king-sized bed in the master bedroom. Betty went out on the porch and smoked a cigarette. Lars slept in a crib in the dressing room which dog-legged off the bedroom. Betty returned and crawled into bed.
She slept.
She ground her teeth. A low wave irritation accompanied by atonal humming. It did no good to wake her. Beadles had begged her to visit a dentist, a psychiatrist, someone to stop the grinding. Betty flew into a fury the second time he did this. It was better to just keep his mouth shut and put up with it even if it did cause him many a sleepless night. A big part of marriage was overlooking your spouse's irritating habits.
Lars woke around one a.m. and squawked. Betty heaved herself out of bed and pulled on a flannel robe. "Your turn next time, buster."
Beadles got out of bed too. "I'm going to do a perimeter check."
"That's good. There might be Injuns."
Beadles slipped into his sheepskin moccasins, went into the kitchen and opened the refrigerator. He removed an open carton of orange juice, drank directly from the spout and put it back. He opened the basement door, turned on the lights and went downstairs where he had a makeshift office: a desk, computer, and table covered with books, papers and artifacts. He sat at the desk and opened the center drawer, reaching far back behind the pens, paper clips, flash drives and post-it notes to a small cloth bag in the rear. He pulled it out, opened it, and shook a quarter-sized gold object into his hand.
He held the softly gleaming gold medallion between thumb and forefinger. Squiggly lines radiated from a turquoise center. He had discovered the medallion the first day the Azuma Collection had arrived, before anyone else had seen it. Before Liggett and his apes raced over, even before Anatole had unlocked the door.
Uncatalogued. It had fallen out of a pot filled with beads and shards. One tiny little item. He deserved it for his devotion to his students and the prestige he brought the University. It was otherwise destined to be catalogued and shut away--or perhaps put on display in the university museum--forever to gather dust. No one would miss this one little item out of so vast a collection.
Don't kid yourself. It's stealing.
He planned to mount it on a gold chain and give it to Betty on their anniversary. Betty loved her bling. She had twenty grand in jewelry stashed in an ivory-inlaid dowry box. He tossed the medallion up and down in the palm of his hand, feeling its weight. Now that he'd had an opportunity to open up the whole collection he'd found there wasn't much gold. The Azuma were not big on ornamental jewelry.
It was the squirrely fluting on the arrowheads that convinced him the Azuma were a heretofore undiscovered tribe. He saw the pattern repeated on some of the pottery and woven baskets. No other tribe to his knowledge had ever used it. A squiggly line embossed in gold and worked into stone. How had they done it?
He turned the disc over. The back was flat and rough. He planned to epoxy a small gold loop on the back through which to run the chain.
The old floor creaked as Betty comforting Lars came to the head of the stairs.
"What are you doing?"
"Just checking on a few things. Go back to bed. I'll be right up."
She padded away. Beadles slipped the gtold bead back into its pouch and replaced it in the back of his drawer.
Tomorrow was the department party and he had to get some rest.
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